“... it: Everybody in South Carolina knew that blacks, for reasons unknown, fancied clay … The eating took place in a bedroom, for the galvanised bucket of clay was kept under the bed, for the cool. It was blue clay from a creek, the consistency of slightly gritty ice cream. It lay smooth and delicious-looking in its pail of clear water. You scooped it out and ...”

“... cloak) he would preach vigorously.’ (He also loved a game called mesmerism, in which he took the part of the victim.) Cummie almost certainly provoked the terrors that only she could soothe, but Louis was addicted like a Covenanter to her hellfire images, and without her care felt that he might have died in Heriot Row. ‘How well I remember her ...”

“... I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the ...”

“... not for pigs, or chickens): why would they ban it if there really was nothing to fear? The public took the hint, and began to waver in its passion for beef, and especially beefburgers, which, of course, include bits of dead cow you’d just as soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then ...”

“... Thomas’s notion was that if you looked after the sound it didn’t matter whether the sense took care of itself; that it was possible to write great poems without worrying too much what they meant. The pleasure one gets from a Thomas poem has nothing to do with the pleasure of working it out or even the sense that one day one will be able to work it ...”

“... feet away. Before the hood was placed over Gilmore’s head, the man walked over to the chair, and took both of the killer’s hands into his own. ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ he said. Gilmore looked up, and replied sweetly: ‘You’re going to help me escape.’ The man’s name was Lawrence Schiller. And he did help Gilmore escape: he ...”

“... made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not ...”

“... some secret. That was why they forced him kicking and screaming into the trunk of a car and took him to the Cajón del Maipo. There, in the middle of the mountain night, they let him out and they shot him, just as he had done to so many of his own targets. Just as had been done to José Weibel, to Carlos Maluje Contreras. The man who tortured people ...”

“... her psychedelic, post-apocalyptic installation at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2021, which took full advantage of the neoclassical surroundings. It must have been hard to translate the work, which included sound, colourful video projections and otherworldly sculptures, to the compact space it occupies at Tate Liverpool. The cluster of video screens ...”

“... century that what Charbonnier calls the modern project of ‘abundance and autonomy’ properly took shape; the later extraction of enormous stocks of carbon from the ground, which liberated European economies from dependence on the sun and the seasons, merely allowed this project to be realised. Even before Watt’s steam engine and the first factories, it ...”

“... children to play with their son and daughter. For reasons that never quite emerge Bernstein later took up again what he somewhat grandiloquently calls ‘the project’. Loyalties – bearing the subtitle ‘a son’s memoir’ – is the result. It is a transparently sentimental book, and a slightly uncomfortable one. To his credit, Bernstein does not seek ...”

“... some came to be treated virtually as stewards and found themselves entrusted with duties that took them far beyond the bounds of the gentle little worlds in which they would otherwise have expected to spend their lives. The elder Tradescant was just such a man. By 1610, when he first comes into certain view (apart from the record of his marriage), in the ...”

“... remembered it now) and for which she had searched for years. No one had been able to find it. She took it as a priceless relic and kissed it.’ Dan Jacobson’s tone is cooler but just as intent: ‘nothing is more mysterious to us than the processes which suddenly present to our awareness a long-forgotten face or phrase from childhood.’ And there are ...”

“... should be temporarily garrisoned by the Chinese and British armies. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang took the North and the British under General Gracey occupied the South. In a little known and not very creditable episode, Gracey’s men released the Japanese soldiers and used them to hold down the locals until the French returned. I once asked Vietnam’s ...”